FROM THE UNITED STATES REMAIN IN THE CITIES ALONG OUR NORTHERN BORDER, AS MUCH TO PROVIDE LODGING FOR THEM WITH DIGNITY AS BEFITS ANY MEXICAN CITIZEN, AS TO PROTECT OUR COUNTRY FROM AMERICAN RAIDS.
In the courtyard of Aunt Cuca’s house, Catalino changes the message tied to another pigeon, Mi Morena, and sets her flying southward.
Mi Morena arrives in the camp of the Seminoles (or Mascogos, as the Mexicans call them). The message is handed immediately to Wild Horse, the chief, and to Juan Caballo, the leader of the fugitive African slaves, an ally of Wild Horse from long before their sojourn south of the Río Bravo.
The message makes the Seminoles anxious. It reawakens their worst fear: the frontier may no longer provide protection against the gringos.
“We left everything we knew,” says Wild Horse, “to escape from the White Cholera. We bade goodbye to the buffalo, the plains, the birds and their songs. Now we risk our lives living in caves where moss grows on our clothes, beneath an unknown sky where no ducks fly, in stagnant air that reverberates with the sounds of unknown insects, on unforgiving land, just to get away from the gringos. Have we changed our world for nothing, only to suffer them again?”
The members of the camp wail and beat their chests. In a few hours they send Mi Morena back. She returns to Matasánchez without a message.
They send their message to Querétaro, via Parcial, Juan Caballo’s pigeon, who flies off. If we were to wait for him to arrive we’d lose the thread of our story, so we’ll leave it there and go back to the Valley of the Rio Grande, the prairie, Indian Territory.
Nicolaso writes out copies of the phrase and entrusts them to several pigeons. We saw the first one fly to Matasánchez with Favorita. The second travels northward on the feet of Hidalgo, the white pigeon. On the Pulla cotton plantation a young mulatto (son of Lucie, the slave they say was mistress to Gabriel Ronsard, the café owner) receives the pigeon, scratches his crotch, and reads the message aloud. The overseer scratches his head and listens. The Negros under his supervision listen, too, scratching their chests and necks in front of a small group of Indians who have come to trade—they’ve brought two tame mustangs they want to exchange for bullets and cotton, which they’ll take back to Indian Territory and exchange for prisoners.
The Indians don’t itch themselves now—the Pulla plantation is infested with fleas—but they’ll be itching later, after they bring the bug-ridden cotton home with them.
For the cautious, vindictive foreman the news is of little interest, no matter how he looks at it he can’t see why it matters.
For the Negros it’s downright scandalous. Nepomuceno is a living legend. According to local lore he was kidnapped by Indians as a boy, an unfounded rumor that was spread by El Tigre, the runaway slave from Guinea who was captured by the Comanches and returned to his owner for a handsome reward. A good-looking, healthy, young Negro with strong teeth who could read and write, he was clean, conscientious, and hard-working, worth his weight in gold. From the day of his arrival he has told stories, many untrue, about Nepomuceno.
Having been kidnapped isn’t the only reason Nepomuceno is a living legend. It’s the stories about his riding, cattle-rustling, skirt-chasing, and fighting, along with his unparalleled roping skills and having been born into money, that make him a living legend; cowards fear him and women dream about him for good reason. There’s no one like Nepomuceno—who’s also a redhead, according to some.
The young mulatto puts Hidalgo in the pigeon loft and begins to pray: “Holy Mother, look after Don Nepomuceno.”
A third pigeon flies the first leg of his trip alongside Hidalgo. When Hidalgo lands in Pulla, the other pigeon continues across a stretch of bare land, where there’s not even one lonely huisache, just stone-hard earth, before landing on the adobe arch that guards the Well of the Fallen.
That’s how Noah Smithwick, the Texan pioneer who leads slave-hunting parties, hears the news. These men make a fortune by returning slaves to their so-called owners for ransom. As you might imagine, Shears’ insult is a joy to Noah Smithwick’s ears. He detests Nepomuceno and anyone else who so much as resembles a Mexican. Mexico ruins his trade, with its nonsensical ideas about property and other crazy notions, which would drive any self-respecting businessman to rack and ruin.
“The Mexicans will never amount to anything, they’re a people without wherewithal, good for nothing but cooking and looking after the horses.”
Two Born-to-Run Indians carry the news northward from the Well of the Fallen.
The news quickly reaches the King Ranch, neither by pigeon nor by Born-to-Run. A godlike horseman (dressed in white, riding a white mare) delivers the news, so quickly, in fact, that it was said to have been delivered by lightning bolt.
The news travels north toward the Coal Gang with the Born-to-Run Indians.
The Coal Gang are bandits who roam both sides of the frontier; they go wherever the loot is. The majority are Mexicans. They have their preferred targets:
1 Gringos. And anyone who looks like them, with the exception of their leader, Bruno, who has the blondest beard in the region—his men say it’s because of the sun, which has bleached it, but those who knew him back when he hid beneath his mother’s dark skirts and the brim of his father’s (very elegant) hat know that he was born with white hair, and skin so white it was almost blinding. But now Bruno is dark as ebony. A miner who made his own fortune rather than inheriting one, he had silver mines in Zacatecas and a gold mine further north. Business was doing so well there that he decided to sell the silver mines to finance his prospecting, investing everything but the shirt on his back. But it was his bad luck that the Great Theft had begun, and they took his mine from him using the law. He had conquered the bowels of the earth, but he couldn’t prevail against evil.
2 Stealman’s friends. Stealman is the one who, from his office in New York, carried out the aforementioned legal proceedings.
3 The Nouveau Riche, who made their fortunes off the new frontier.
4 Priests, and especially bishops, who knows why.
Their guiding principles were clear: first their profit and their benefit. Secondly, their benefit and their profit. Thirdly, their profit and their benefit. Fourthly, their enjoyment—and that’s where things get complicated.
The Coal Gang is like a family. Their leader, Bruno, was born on an island in the distant north. Some call him The Viking, but he doesn’t look it—his father was the bastard son of the King of Sweden. The rest of the gang was born in the region, in or near the Río Bravo Valley. It’s all the same to them.
Each of them has been betrayed by his nearest and dearest:
Their leader, Bruno, by his own blood. His father was the first-born—though illegitimate—and he’s also the first-born, and illegitimate too, in keeping with family tradition. Logic and justice would see him crowned king. He believes he is the true heir of Gustav, the Grace of God, King of Rügen and Lord of Wismar, Duke of Norway, Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn and Dithmarschen, Count of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. But he’s just a bandit from the heart of Mexico: the Prince of Highway Bandits, the King of Terror (it wasn’t that he didn’t like the idea of being king, but since he didn’t like the cold he would have moved the capital of his kingdom to Africa; and King of Terror sounded pretty good to him).
His right-hand man, nicknamed Pizca, betrayed by his older brother, who stole his birthright and left him with nothing but his own two hands, against their father’s wishes. Tall as Bruno, with the same
